Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life
, who was at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany at the time, looked for protein families that were common across the species of bacteria, as these were likely to be truly ancient—dating back over three billion years to the last common ancestor of all bacteria. They found 146 such protein families, revealing that even the earliest bacteria were extraordinarily intricate and the product of a long period of evolution.
Many ideas have been put forward, including a molecule that can copy itself such as a strand of RNA, or a fatty “bubble” or “blob” that could have acted as the foundational structure of a cell. But a growing group of scientists believe that before genes or cell walls, the first thing life needed was an engine.Life is fundamentally active. Even in seemingly stationary organisms like trees, there is furious activity at the microscopic scale.
Similarly, every living thing takes in nutrients and uses them to build and repair its body. For humans, that means eating foods and then using our digestive systems to break them down into simple chemicals that our bodies can use. The chemistry of metabolism is so central to life that many researchers believe it must have been at the core of the first living cells. Once a metabolic engine was up and running, the thinking goes, it could create the other chemicals that life needs, and gradually cells would self-assemble, saysHowever, all metabolism-first hypotheses for the origin of life face the same problem: Metabolism, like life itself, is remarkably complex.
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